One Hundred and One Ways

by Mako Yoshikawa

  “Oh yeah,” he said, releasing the table’s edge and looking a little startled. And then he sat forward again. “Couldn’t you leave for a little while anyway—just a week or so?”

  I gazed at him across the table and idly cursed that pull of his, the X-factor he had in spades. For there it was again, like the rumblings of a train beneath our feet, passing us by all but unheeded: the undercurrents of sexual desire, which unfortunately seemed to run in only one direction. Hark, I thought. Ha.

  “I can’t, if you’re leaving in February,” I told him, looking down at my fingernails, with their chipping polish. “I honestly can’t afford to miss all that school.”

  The light in his eyes flickered and then was gone as if it had never been.

  “I would postpone the trip,” he said uneasily, “except that I’m signed up to lead that group out on a hike.”

  “Of course,” I said, looking at him with some surprise. “Obviously. No one’s asking you to give up the trip.”

  He continued as if I had not spoken. “I do want to live in New York. It’s just that I’ve stayed here longer than I’ve stayed anywhere else since I left home, and these days, it doesn’t seem enough to ride around on the subways anymore. I’ve got to go….” He stopped, drawn up short, as he frequently was, by the inadequacy of the English language. He extended an arm upward, palm turning inward, and then he clenched it, head cocked, as he thought. “Somewhere else,” was all he managed. “Somewhere completely else. At least for a while.”

  “Somewhere completely else,” I repeated. “It does sound good.”

  He told me then that he would come back by the spring, and that we would have the whole summer ahead of us. That it was only a short trip, just three months. And that I was busy with school, anyway.

  I interrupted him just as he was beginning to speak about the trip out west that we would take during the summer. “You don’t owe me an explanation, you know,” I said.

  He met my eyes, then, and slowly smiled. There was a skeptical tilt to his eyebrows, and I thought he was going to contradict me, but instead he reached across the table, bent my head down, and peering nearsightedly at my scalp, began sifting through my hair.

  “This is it, this is my favorite,” he crowed.

  In his fingers was a long and shining silver strand.

  “If you have to get your hair dyed, Ki, don’t do this one. I’ll be looking for this guy when I get back.”

  For a second I could not speak.

  It seems entirely fitting, given how Phillip died, that when I was close enough to hear him breathe, I was sometimes beset by the symptoms of an attack of acrophobia: vertigo, light-headedness, even a touch of nausea. At such times I could only take in air in quick, shallow breaths. Mostly, though, I just tended to freeze when his body was too near, some atavistic reflex kicking in to prevent me from taking another step forward. Much as I would like to pass this strange paralysis off as yet another trait that I have in common with my mother and grandmother, a flaw, like my insomnia, which is woven into my genes and therefore beyond my control, this failing is mine alone: fear just served to galvanize Yukiko into action, while my mother is only afraid of literal heights.

  “You shouldn’t be doing this in public,” I said at last, my voice harsh. “It’s undignified. You’re like one of those monkeys picking out his mate’s fleas.”

  He clumsily tucked the loose strand back into the rest of my hair, and then he patted my head. “We’ll travel together in the summer,” he said again. “I promise.”

  After I fall asleep on some nights, I wake up to find myself standing in the cold. I want to walk on the snow to hear it crunch, but as I lift my foot, a crack spreads slowly through the white of the mountains. The rush of the snow is silent and deadly, and I wait with one foot suspended in midair.

  I heard about his accident while I stood in line at the deli on Broadway and West 113th Street. It was the last Monday in February, and Phillip had been gone on his trek for three weeks. The deli was crowded and I was waiting to buy two poppy-seed bagels when the door opened and a tall figure wrapped in a scarf and a long, dark coat entered, along with a gust of chilling air.

  “Kiki.”

  I looked up. She pulled off the scarf, which was as black as the coat and her hair. Russia likes black.

  “Hi.” I felt the strain on my lips as I smiled. Although Russia and I had spent a lot of time together at the start of the school year, our friendship had cooled over the past months.

  She came and stood close to me. “How are you holding up?” she asked. “I was going to call you again tonight.”

  “Oh, fine. How are you doing?” I had spent a frustrating day in the library and I wanted to go home, but she was being so friendly I felt obliged to move away from the cash register to let the other customers go ahead.

  “Oh, I’m hanging in there, I guess.” She blinked a few times and bit her bottom lip. She did not look well. Her eyes were bloodshot and swollen, her nose was running slightly, and her skin was shockingly pale.

  “You all right?” I said, readjusting the weight of the knapsack on my shoulders.

  She glanced at me sharply, and then narrowed her eyes. “Haven’t you heard?”

  “About what?”

  “Phillip. Haven’t you heard about Phillip?” She sounded almost angry. “I left you a message on your answering machine—didn’t you get it?”

  I shook my head, too embarrassed to admit I had turned off the sound.

  “Didn’t you see the news? It was in the papers and everything.”

  “No.” I felt a tightening inside of me.

  “Kiki, he’s dead.” Her voice was low and steady. “There was some kind of avalanche, and a lot of people got buried in the snow. It happened two days ago, on Saturday.”

  Russia is very striking, with stark white skin and black hair. She is so fair that she freckles and burns easily, but of course it was winter then. At some point in the fall she had had most of her hair shaved off, and I was glad to see that it had almost completely grown back. I was envying the length of her eyelashes when she grabbed me by the shoulders. “You okay? Kiki, snap out of it.” She shook me hard enough to make my head hurt.

  “I’m okay.” I shrugged her hands off.

  “Want to get some coffee? You shouldn’t be alone now.”

  I looked away. At the counter, a small gray-haired man was having a coughing fit. The woman at the cash register was waiting for him to pay for a pack of cigarettes, and I wondered if the man tried to quit sometimes, or whether he had given up trying long ago.

  “Kiki?” Russia’s voice was gentle.

  “I think I need to be alone, but thanks.” I handed her the bag with the two bagels. “Could you do me a favor and return these for me? I don’t think I want them after all.”

  “Oh, sure.” She took the bag from me and fiddled with it, twirling and twisting until her forefingers were wrapped in plastic. “I’m sorry, Kiki.”

  I told her I had to get home. I buttoned the top of my coat and pulled my gloves on, and then I waved even though she was standing less than six inches away.

  She called out to me once again, but I had already opened the door by then, and her exact words were swallowed by the wind.

  Obaasama, I will say. Grandmother, Phillip died eighteen months ago, but here I am now, engaged to be married. Are you impressed, as I am, at how quickly I moved on?

  In those first few months following Phillip’s departure, I went through the motions. I woke up late, went to class, went to aerobics, and ate store-bought food, cake and cookies and fudge. I had written a couple of letters to Phillip in the weeks he had been gone, and I continued to do so after the accident. I mailed the letters to the lodge in Nepal and later, when they turned up in my own mailbox marked “No such person at this address,” I opened them up and read them as if they had been sent to me.

  I continued to avoid Russia, just as I did before I saw her in the deli that day. I did not talk to an
yone about Phillip because there was no one but Russia to talk to, and nothing really to say. I did not get my hair cut; it grew long and ragged and the ends became coppery and dry. I did not trim my nails, and they cracked and split with their own unwieldy length. I thought of him often. I sat in a corner of the kitchen and killed hundreds of ants with my bare hands.

  Then I resolved to keep busy. I bought a digital watch so I could plan and budget the hours to the minute, and I studied hard, reading Milton and furiously scrawling notes onto pads. Dressed in an old pair of jeans and a dirty sweatshirt, I waxed the floor; I scrubbed the bathtub until its ring was only a faint breath of scandal from the past. I signed up as a volunteer at a local high school and tutored basic English to pregnant teenagers. I went to classical music concerts.

  In the late winter I went out in the evenings for long punishing runs in Riverside Park and came home in the dark with aching knees and eyes that teared with the cold, my sense of virtue in direct proportion to my discomfort. I stayed at the library far into the night so I could go straight to bed when I got home. In bed I read and reread novels by dead people from distant lands, masturbated over memories of ex-lovers, and had dreams in which I drank boiling hot sake and danced with my grandmother the geisha. I got a haircut. I went to movies during the day, when other people also go alone; New York theatres are filled with solitary strangers between noon and seven. I felt as if our shared silence was companionable, yet they sat far apart from me in the darkness.

  Even though we only talked about my thesis, I called my mother often. I hated New York. My face looked so huge and hideous that I started swimming a mile every other day, and I increased my weekly running minimum from thirty miles to forty. I skipped meals but late at night I scooped out sugar from the bowl and crunched on the white granules. I lost all the weight I gained, and then some. I wore turtle-necks all the time because the bones stuck out sharply from the base of my neck and because I was always cold. I missed Horse. Sleepy and dazed from watching a movie one Friday afternoon, I slipped and fell to my knees on the wet sidewalk outside Lincoln Center. When I looked up from the ground, the April sunshine dazzled me so that for a moment I could not see.

  Such was my life before I met Eric.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  ON SATURDAY ERIC wants us to go shopping for the engagement ring, but I plead the horror of midtown crowds in the heat of August, and so we decide instead to be tourists for the day. We take the subway down to 59th Street and then we catch a cab, over to Queens. It is muggy, as always, but the sun is shining and the sky is a hazy blue.

  Eric wants to take my picture against the skyline, to send home to his family He uses up a whole roll of film in the sculpture park, and scolds me for making faces, although I do my best to smile. There are fishermen standing at the edge of the water, and they watch and nod encouragement to me.

  Afterwards we wander around the park, admiring the sculptures. Orange beams crisscross against each other like an enormous pile of sticks, and a huge face gazes out at Manhattan. We stop at an otherworldly contraption made of what looks like scratched silver; it has swooping curves and looks like an asymmetrical bubble.

  “I wonder who made this one,” I say. But Eric has been accosted by a pair of real tourists, and does not hear.

  A head pokes out, then, from behind one of the curves. “David Smith,” it says, and disappears.

  I walk a little farther, tripping over the artist’s plaque: David Smith. Around the bend, the boy peers out at me from the shadows of the sculpture.

  “Can I come inside, too?” I ask.

  “I’m six,” he says, still blocking the entrance.

  “That’s a coincidence,” I say. “I’m twenty-six.”

  He nods at me, then, the shared digit proving to be the password, and moves aside to let me in.

  I glance back at Eric, but the tourists, it seems, want to know how to get to the Brooklyn Bridge. Eric, whose sense of direction is impeccable, has thrown himself into explaining the way, even to the extent of drawing a map on the ground with the toe of his shoe.

  The interior of the sculpture is cool; it smells faintly of basement. The walls, which are smooth to the touch, muffle the sounds from the park. The boy crouches on the inside of one curve, but there is ample room for me to take another.

  We embark on a conversation, one that has its own rhythm, filled more with silences than with words. He tells me that he lives out there, gesturing in the general direction of Manhattan, and I tell him I do, too. When he grows up, he says, he is going to live in this sculpture all the time. After a particularly long pause, during which he scrutinizes me carefully, he shows me his secret: the niche in which he keeps his stash of food, in anticipation of his move. Nestled in a nook of the sculpture is a candy bar, a bottle of juice, a bag of potato chips.

  I tell him that he should start collecting cans, as candy and chips will eventually attract bugs. He nods. I open my purse and rummage in its deepest corners until I find the can opener. It is miniature and perfect, more like a toy than a tool, and I show him how it flips open with a flick of the wrist.

  “It’s from Japan,” I explain. “My grandmother sent it to me when I was little, but you can have it since she’s sending herself over pretty soon.”

  He accepts it gravely, looking down at it and flipping it open and shut with such attention that he does not look up when I thank him for the visit and get up to leave.

  Eric is pacing impatiently back and forth by the huge stone face, but he stops when he sees me clambering out of the bubble. I am smiling as I approach him, yet there is something in the stiffness of his posture that smothers the light apology rising to my throat. He stares down at me, his sunglasses rendering his expression unreadable.

  “I’m just going to pretend you didn’t do that,” he says finally.

  He takes me by the hand and begins walking swiftly towards the park exit.

  “What exactly did I do?” I ask, half-skipping to keep up.

  He does not stop to answer my question. “You ran away,” he says, “again. Just like you always do.”

  In all of the photographs, which we get back just a few hours later, my hair is in my face, and the sun in my eyes. Eric flips through the stack with mounting disbelief, for (as he says again and again) the wind wasn’t even blowing. In the one photograph of us together, taken by the oldest fisherman, Eric huddles over me protectively. Buried in his shadow and masked with hair, I am unrecognizable, a shapeless, sexless figure crouching for shelter against a nonexistent wind.

  In the evening, Eric and I go out to dinner and we get home early, well before ten, so I call my mother. Today is not the first time that Eric has lost his temper with me, nor is it the first time that I have called my mother after he has done so. It is not as if I would ever even think of telling her about the tiffs that Eric and I have. But even so, even if we never do talk about much of anything together, it soothes me to hear her voice (her cadences, those misplaced pauses) after Eric and I fight, just as it did on those nights I was most missing Phillip.

  I can dial her number faster than any other. While I wait for her to answer, I envision her flipping on the lights as she moves through beautifully decorated rooms. With excellent taste and unlimited time and money, she could not fail to make her home a wonder. It is Western with a few choice Japanese details: the carp in the pond by the woods, the rock garden, the bonsai under the window, the demure doll dressed in a kimono on the mantelpiece. The food she eats is also a mix of cultures, the pasta dishes flavored with Oriental spices and a small bowl of rice accompanying tuna fish sandwiches. While she makes a point of eating with fork and knife and spoon, she can only cook with a pair of chopsticks in her hand.

  Her feet are deformed with the swelling of her joints and her replaced hip moves with some stiffness, but my mother always manages to pick up the phone before the third ring. When she uses the phone, she does not sit down; the cord hangs slack and it curls in the middle by her knees. It cannot
be comfortable for her to stand so, and I feel guilty whenever our conversations go on longer than five minutes.

  I could make a fair guess at the exact distance between my mother’s feet as she stands by the phone. I know how still she will be as she listens to me, and I can almost always predict what she will say and how she will phrase it. Yet when Eric, soon after I met him, asked me to describe her, I hesitated, daunted by the task of summing up my mother.

  “She’s been disappointed a number of times in her life,” I said finally, “and it shows. She was a different person when she was young.”

  Then I described for him the concrete nature of her possessions, her daily habits and her physical appearance: the lush, healthy plants she waters at six every morning, the Persian rugs and the somber dark furniture, the newspapers and the magazines she reads meticulously and religiously, the fastidious way she compartmentalizes and cuts up her food, the tailored cut of her clothes and the hair that always falls impeccably into place, the paleness of her skin and the ravages of her disease. Eric seemed satisfied with my account of her, but I knew the extent of its inadequacy.

  He met her soon afterwards, when she came to New York to get her thumb straightened. She has met other lovers of mine, but I was surprisingly nervous when she and I walked into the cafe and saw him waiting at a table.

  “Mom, this is Eric. Eric, this is my mother, Akiko T-Takehashi,” I said, stumbling on the familiar name.

  Did I really believe he would address her as a Ms. or even a Mrs.? If so, I was being foolish, for of course he called her by her first name, and with such naturalness that she relaxed visibly under the intimacy of it.

  “Nice to meet you, Akiko,” he said. He even stood up, pulled out a chair, and called over the waiter, all in one smooth gesture.

  He then sat back down and looked at her, then at me, and then at her again.

  “So?” I said after a while. “Do we look alike?”